[OSM-dev] planet info

[David Earl]

How feasible would it be to put a set of attributes either on the top 
level element or an element created for the purpose which tells me how 
many nodes, ways and relations there are in the file. If you have the 
counts to hand at the beginning, great, but if not if you wrote '... 
nodecount="000000000000" waycount="000000000000" 
relationcount="000000000000"' at the beginning, and then when you've 
output the elements and counted them up as you do it, at the end seek 
back and replace the zeros with the counts.

This would enable me and others to do progress reporting on making a 
pass through the file. (I can't do it by file size and read position 
because the filesize function won't go bigger than 2Gb in PHP, and I 
can't count the elements before I start without completely decompressing 
the file first, which I no longer have enough free disk to do).

David